As late-night TV entered its second week back after the writers-strike-induced hiatus, the hosts were faced with confronting a global crisis. When it came to addressing the weekend’s fatal attack on Israel by Hamas, all of the major late-night hosts took a delicate approach. Post-monologue, The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon sat behind his desk while sending “our love to anyone affected over the attacks in Israel over the weekend.”
Later in the evening, Seth Meyers concluded his Late Night monologue by saying that he wouldn’t “pretend to have any answers as to how to respond to a crisis like this,” adding, “I will only say that in the moments when we are confronted with such evil, inhumane acts, we are most at risk of losing our own humanity. When we are justifiably blind with rage and sadness, we can make choices that will have massive, irrevocable impacts on the lives of our fellow man. It requires the absolute best of us to think clearly in times like this. And I hope with all my heart the best of us can emerge in this time of unthinkable loss.”
Over on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert said his writers “didn’t even attempt to write jokes about this” at the top of Monday’s episode. “The human mind simply refuses to do it. Even AI refused to do it,” he continued, claiming that ChatGPT responded to a request to do so by stating that “‘making jokes about such matters can easily be seen as insensitive, disrespectful, or offensive to those who are suffering as a result.’” Colbert added, “I, for one, want to commend our future robot overlords. That is a rare show of humanity from something that can’t identify which photos contain a traffic light.”
Jimmy Kimmel managed the most jabs while acknowledging the “nightmare situation,” namely by going after “our super-duper pro-Israel former president Donald Trump”—who, Kimmel said, “immediately found a way to make it about himself.” The host then displayed comments made by the former president over the weekend, in which he wrote, “The horrible attack on Israel, much like the attack on Ukraine, would never have happened if I were president. Zero chance!” Said Kimmel, “That’s right, if he was president, we’d all be blissfully downing jiggers of bleach. There’d be no war anywhere.”
Kimmel concluded his comments on the topic by cycling through statements Trump made at a Saturday rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he compared his physical capabilities to Joe Biden’s, who is only three years his senior. “On the day one of our closest allies is hit by a devastating terrorist attack, Trump is onstage talking about how much better his body is than Joe Biden’s,” Kimmel summarized. “Maybe instead of an election next year, we just have a wet T-shirt contest and end it.”